All Articles by Peter Baumgartner

4 Tips for the Best Results From a Development Agency Partnership

Aug. 25, 2023

As your organization looks to resolve nagging problems with its website, app, or other tool, engaging with outside developers can feel daunting. Maybe your last agency collaboration didn’t yield the right results, or you’re worried about operating within a tight …

3 Areas to Monitor When Evaluating Your Website’s Health

July 2, 2023

When you’re responsible for your organization’s website, you live in a state of constant worry about its stability. After all, your site is the most prominent touchpoint between the audience you need and the message you have to deliver. If …

Secure a Successful Digital Transformation by Avoiding 4 Potential Pitfalls

June 26, 2023

When your organization is planning a digital transformation, your website is the headlining act. Rethinking the technology and strategies that best support your message going forward requires time, effort, and a significant investment. If you don’t manage the effort to …

Running your Django project with main.py

June 14, 2023

I don’t like Django’s manage.py. My gripes against it are: The plethora of files that clutter the root directory of our repos annoys me. manage.py is just one more in a long line of those. In my opinion, there are …

Python provides the tools and flexibility our clients need to thrive

May 25, 2023

When our agency began in 2007, using Python on the web was still a rarity, but some new projects in the space were starting to pop up. TurboGears had gained popularity with its MVC approach, but it was another Python …

Can Your Site Handle Going Viral?

April 24, 2023

It’s every publisher’s dream to “go viral” and reach thousands, if not millions, of new people. Many videos, tweets, images, articles, and infographics are created with exactly this goal in mind. But far too often, less thought goes into ensuring …

Using pyproject.toml in your (Django) project

Feb. 16, 2023

Back in 2018, I wrote about using setup.py in your Django/Python project. Five years later, setup.py is being phased out in favor of pyproject.toml. I’m a big fan of this change. With setup.py you could really go off the rails …

How to Choose a Web Development Agency in 2023

Feb. 7, 2023

Your website is the hub of your business. It holds the promise of competitive advantage and the responsibility of delivering excellent customer service. Designing and building any new web application or restructuring your web development operations is a substantial undertaking, …

Python Package Manager Shootout

July 25, 2022

tl;dr I built a benchmark for Python Package managers, you can view it at https://lincolnloop.github.io/python-package-manager-shootout/ When starting a new Python project, you have a few different options for how you want to manage your dependencies. Like Node.js has npm, yarn, …

Choosing a Django Version

June 13, 2022

One of the first things you need to do when starting a new Django project is to choose which version of Django you are going to use. At any given time, there could be as many as three supported Django …

High Performance Django Is Free Online

Oct. 6, 2021

In 2014 Yann Malet and I (with the help of the rest of the team here) wrote a book about building and scaling Django websites. It was the culmination of things we’d learned from, at the time, close to a …

Distributed Locking in Django

Aug. 11, 2020

As you start scaling an application out horizontally (adding more servers/instances), you may run into a problem that requires distributed locking. That’s a fancy term, but the concept is simple. Sometimes you have to be sure that when a block …

Goodconf: A Python Configuration Library

July 29, 2020

I’ve been working quite a bit lately on streamlining Lincoln Loop’s standard deployment systems. One thorn we’ve always had is how to handle application configuration. In the past, we would have our configuration management system write the configuration out to …

Python Dependency Locking with pip-tools

July 22, 2020

Two of the biggest benefits pipenv and poetry are dependency locking and hash checking. Dependency locking means you can specify the direct dependencies your code requires, for example, celery==4.4.* and the tooling will lock, not only celery to a specific …

Dissecting a Python Zipapp Built with Shiv

July 6, 2020

In a previous post, we showed how to use shiv to bundle a Django project into a single file for distribution and deployment. Running a large Python project as a single file feels like magic – which is great until …

Single-file Python/Django Deployments

July 10, 2019

This post covers portions of my talk, Containerless Django, from DjangoCon US 2018. Deploying Python has improved significantly since I started working with it over a decade ago. We have virtualenv, pip, wheels, package hash verification, and lock files. Despite …

Saying Goodbye to BotBot.me

Sept. 11, 2018

Our venerable IRC logger, BotBot.me logged its first lines in the summer of 2012 . Since then, it has logged over 100 million lines for more than 400 IRC channels, primarily on the Freenode and Mozilla networks. Despite the rise …

Sandboxing Services with Systemd

July 25, 2018

With Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) now a year away from end-of-life, we’ve been planning and performing upgrades for the soon-to-be legacy OS. The biggest change is the move from Upstart to Systemd for managing services. It’s trivial to convert a service …

Logging to Systemd's Journal in Python

May 24, 2018

I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical about Systemd and its companion log aggregator Journald, but after working with if for a few months, I’ve seen the light (or drunk the Kool Aid… not sure). Typically I …

Goodbye manage.py

April 19, 2018

Every Django project starts with a manage.py file in its root. It’s a convenience script that allows you to run administrative tasks like Django’s included django-admin. In our last post, we discussed the merits of including a setup.py file in …

Using setup.py in Your (Django) Project

Jan. 30, 2018

A client recently asked me why all the Django projects we create have a setup.py in the root of the project. Lots of projects get by just fine without one, so why do I use it? The explanation turned out …

Django Logging, The Right Way

Nov. 28, 2017

Good logging is critical to debugging and troubleshooting problems. Not only is it helpful in local development, but in production it’s indispensable. When reviewing logs for an issue, it’s rare to hear somebody say, “We have too much logging in …

Disabling Error Emails in Django

Oct. 10, 2017

One of Django’s nice “batteries included” features is the ability to send emails when an error is encountered. This is a great feature for small sites where minor problems would otherwise go unnoticed. Once your site start getting lots of …

Dynamic Test Servers with Salt

Sept. 12, 2017

One of the things I love about the DevOps movement is how (when done right) it empowers developers to work with infrastructure in a safe and controlled manner. Once you’ve nailed down deployments to a static set of servers (production, …

The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 2

Aug. 29, 2017

In this long overdue follow-up to Part 1, I’ll be discussing the infrastructure issues associated with creating and serving image thumbnails at scale. The naive solution to generating thumbnails is to declare the image sizes you want in your templates …

Django Patterns: Fat Models and cached_property

Aug. 15, 2017

One of my favorite patterns in Django is the combination of “fat” models and cached_property from django.utils.functional. Fat models are a general MVC concept which encourages pushing logic into methods on your Model layer rather than the Controller (“view” in …

Django Anti-Patterns: Signals

July 18, 2017

Django’s Signal Dispatcher is a really powerful feature that you should never use. Ok, it has valid use cases, but they may be rarer than you think. First, to dispel a misconception about signals, they are not executed asynchronously. There …

Multiple Sites with Routing in uWSGI

June 27, 2017

In another of our “you can do that?!?” with uWSGI posts, today I’ll show you how to use uWSGI to host multiple sites and properly route traffic based on the hostname to those sites. Multiple Sites (aka Emperor Mode) uWSGI …

10 Years of Lincoln Loop

June 13, 2017

April marked Lincoln Loop’s 10th anniversary in business. As I reflect on that, I find myself going through all the typical platitudes: it’s been a roller-coaster ride, how proud I am of the team, looking forward to another 10 years, …

Serving Static Files with uWSGI

June 7, 2017

Serving Static Files with uWSGI As noted in a previous post, uWSGI is a Swiss Army knife of functionality. One of its features is a built-in static file server. When to Use uWSGI for Serving Static Files While it may …

The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 1

Feb. 23, 2016

Images are everywhere on the web. Whether you’re building a simple blog, a CMS, or a true web application, chances are good that you’ll need to deal with images. Editors, authors, users, etc. expect to be able to upload images …

Our Failed Kickstarter Was Really a Success

Nov. 5, 2015

Our Kickstarter campaign for a companion video series to our book High Performance Django ended today just shy of its target. We consider it a great success! That’s right… a success. When we started the campaign, our internal goal was …

The uWSGI Swiss Army Knife

July 22, 2015

uWSGI is one of those interesting projects that keeps adding features with every new release without becoming totally bloated, slow, and/or unstable. In this post, we’ll look at some of its lesser used features and how you might use them …

Speeding Up NPM Installs

June 12, 2015

I’ve been working on improving our deployment processes as part of the High Performance Django Infrastructure project we’re building out. One consistent pain point is our front-end build system, and particularly, npm installs. For a number of reasons, instead of …

Fast Immutable Python Deployments

May 22, 2015

Alternate title: Pip 7 is Awesome, Here’s Why A typical Python deployment looks like this: Pave the server, setting up a virtualenv and installing any pre-requisites necessary to build/install the Python requirements (compiler, development headers, etc.). To update to a …

A Closer Look at Docker

April 20, 2015

Part of my job at Lincoln Loop is to explore new technologies and make sure that, as a company, we stay current. I’ve been playing around with Docker for a while, but recently decided to redeploy some of our production …

High Performance Django Infrastructure Preview

March 27, 2015

One of the most common requests we’ve heard since releasing our book, High Performance Django is: “Do you have more code/configuration examples?” It’s a pretty loaded question because the book covers everything from Python code to deploying and configuring servers. …

Introducing High Performance Django Expert Sessions

Jan. 21, 2015

With the launch of our book, High Performance Django, we’ve received a number of inquiries from people asking for advice, for which the answers are too specific to their application to give good general advice, and too short to sign …

Rate Limiting with Nginx

Nov. 18, 2014

Do you manage a website? Does it have a login form? Can somebody brute force attack it with every common username/password combination until they find one that works? For many small web applications, the answer to all of the above …

Django: From Runserver to Reddit Hugs

Oct. 1, 2014

Last month, I presented High Performance Django: From Runserver to Reddit Hugs at DjangoCon US in Portland. My assertion was that Django, left to its own devices, does not scale. With the right supporting servers, however, it can scale fantastically. …

High Performance Django: Shipped

Sept. 12, 2014

I’m excited to announce that our book, High Performance Django is officially complete. You can buy a copy at highperformancedjango.com now. Thank You Writing the book was hard work and there were definitely times where the challenge felt insurmountable. I …

High Performance Django Kickstarter Project

May 13, 2014

I'm really excited to (finally) announce that we are writing a book! We've been working with Django professionally for a long time (over 7 years now). During that time, we've learned a lot about how to use the framework to …

Lessons Learned Architecting Realtime Applications

Feb. 18, 2014

Building realtime applications is a big change from how we’ve built websites in the past. Typically, realtime websites require each client holding open a long-running connection to the server so updates can be pushed down to the client immediately. This …

2013 Year in Review

Feb. 9, 2014

2013 was an amazing roller coaster year at Lincoln Loop. This is a long post, so I’ll skip the intro and dive right in. Company Accomplishments Of all the things we did and built, I’m most proud of what we …

Introducing Salmon

June 14, 2013

Over the years, I’ve used a lot of server monitoring systems. Big enterprisey ones like Zabbix, Zenoss, and Hyperic, smaller ones like munin and monit, stuff in the middle like Graphite, and hosted solutions like New Relic. Throughout the search, …

Goodbye Trailmapping

June 12, 2013

Trailmapping.com was a fun experiment with rapid development in Django I released almost 5 years ago now(!). I spoke about it at the first DjangoCon (also my first “real” talk in front of an audience). I didn’t give it much …

Lincoln Loop Retreat 2013

May 15, 2013

Over the last couple months we’ve been busy tying up loose ends and preparing for our first “official” company-wide retreat. Even though we’re a fully distributed team, we’re big believers in the power of meet-ups and face-time. They form bonds, …

Django Settings Parity: You're Doing It Wrong

Feb. 15, 2013

A common paradigm in Django is to create different settings files for different environments (local, production, staging, etc.). Everyone has their own opinion on how to set these up (see ours here), that’s not what this post is about. Instead, …

2012 Year in Review

Jan. 24, 2013

2012 was another amazing year at Lincoln Loop. I’m incredibly proud of the work we accomplished and the growth and development we’ve made as a company. A few of the highlights: We launched our first product, Ginger. It is critical …

Making the Distributed Workplace Work

Jan. 17, 2013

In our last installment, I introduced our distributed workplace and why we prefer it over a traditional office. Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about how to make a distributed workplace, well… work. The single most important we learned …

Introducing BotBot

Dec. 5, 2012

Today we’re introducing a new member of the Lincoln Loop family, BotBot.me. At the moment, BotBot is beautiful hosted IRC logs (try #django or #go-nuts). We built it for people who love IRC and we want your advice to improve …

Realtime Replay Logs with Redis

Oct. 24, 2012

First off, realtime websites are hard. The current toolset is rudimentary. When I first started building Ginger, I thought I must be doing it wrong because of all the trial-and-error and pieces I was building from scratch. After watching Geoff …

The Distributed Workplace

Aug. 20, 2012

Here’s a map of our current offices at Lincoln Loop: That’s 10 people, 5 timezones, and 3 continents for those of you counting at home. I use the term “office” loosely because we don’t have a central office in the …

Referrer Blocking is Hard

June 27, 2012

One of my recent tasks in Ginger was to ensure that we weren’t leaking referrer URLs when you click on an external link in Ginger. It seemed like an easy task and one that’s probably been solved before. What I …

Backbone.js for Django Developers

June 5, 2012

Our new product Ginger relies heavily on Backbone.js for most of the client-side functionality (you can read about our full web-stack here). Our JavaScript guru Marco built the initial prototype and then was pulled away by client work. I reluctantly …

At Lincoln Loop, Everyone Sets Their Own Salary

May 31, 2012

As mentioned in my previous post, everyone at Lincoln Loop sets their own salary. It’s another radical divergance from the business norm that we borrowed from the book of Ricardo Semler. Every six months, I meet with each of our …

Open Book Finances

May 21, 2012

Maverick by Ricardo Semler was an eye-opening read for me a while back. It is a detailed account of his (highly profitable) company which is a radical departure from the traditional workplace. Rework (published over 20 years later) reads like …

Ginger Tech Stack

April 23, 2012

For our latest product, Ginger, we wanted to marry the real-time functionality we needed with the traditional Django stack we know and love. After some false starts and falling on our faces in the beginning, we ended with a stack …

Down with 9 to 5

Jan. 23, 2012

Development is a creative endeavor. Often developers are creating something where there was once nothing. For most us, the thought of being productive for 8 consecutive hours 5 days a week is laughable. 2-3 hours on a single problem is …

Introducing Ginger

Jan. 13, 2012

Our team of 10 is distributed across 8 countries and 3 continents. We have no central office. When we first started, a couple years might go by without ever meeting in person, now we meet in person for at least …

Latest Work and New Client Availability

Nov. 15, 2011

It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything here about Lincoln Loop, so it’s time for a quick update. In short, we’ve been hard at work. In addition to having multiple speakers at DjangoCon, and starting work on an internal …

Get your (arcade) game on!

Sept. 5, 2011

We love the Django community and to show our thanks, we’re throwing a private party Wednesday night for DjangoCon attendees. After dinner (9-11pm), come on down to Ground Kontrol, Portland’s favorite classic arcade. We’ll have an open bar (while supplies …

Filtering Results from Coverage.py

Aug. 24, 2011

Coverage.py makes it easy to see how much of your code is covered by your test suite. It can be configured to spit out reports in XML (for consumption by a continuous integration server like Jenkins), in HTML (for human …

We're Hiring!

Sept. 20, 2010

We’re looking for a Django developer to join our team. With the impending departure of Armin Ronacher to finish his degree, we’re going to be at least one developer short this Fall. We’re looking for somebody who can jump right …

Automated (No Prompt) Deployment with Pip

July 1, 2010

We love pip and Fabric for Django deployment. You can see our boilerplate fabfile.py here. Pip, however, isn’t safe to run in an automated fashion. If you attempt to switch branches or repos for one of your editable requirements, you’ll …

Automatically Running Supervisord on Startup

June 24, 2010

I really like supervisord for long-running process management. It is Python, so it is easy to install and it is easy to script with tools like Fabric. Lately I’ve been deploying smaller Django/WSGI sites with Green Unicorn behind Nginx proxied …

Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging Book Review

June 16, 2010

I just finished reading the copy of Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging by Karen M. Tracey provided to us for review by Packt Publishing. For those of you who don’t know, Karen is a core developer of Django and her …

Gondola for Real Estate Launch

May 24, 2010

I’m pleased to announce that Gondola for Real Estate, our GeoDjango-backed real estate CMS is publicly accepting new customers. A couple weeks ago, we quietly re-launched gondolacms.com with some details about the platform and what it has to offer, as …

Lincoln Loop Development Sprints and Limited Time Discount

May 18, 2010

Today, we are launching a new offering at Lincoln Loop, development services paid by the sprint. Previously, our typical engagements involved a (sometimes lengthy) discovery, estimation, and bidding process. Lately, however, people have been asking us to jump in with …

Installing GeoDjango Dependencies with Homebrew

April 30, 2010

Homebrew seems to be the hot new package manager for OS X, so while setting up a new system last night, I figured I’d see how it handled installing all the external libraries required for GeoDjango. The answer I quickly …

Pro Tip: Redirecting to a Custom Nginx Maintenance Page

Feb. 12, 2010

Here’s one I struggled with a bit while upgrading lincolnloop.com yesterday. Scenario: You need to take your site offline and want to redirect all its traffic to a “down for maintenance” page. For search engine friendliness, that page should return …

The Last 10% or: How to Keep Your Software Development On Time and Under Budget

Nov. 17, 2009

As Lincoln Loop has evolved and grown over the last year, we’ve learned a lot not only about software development, but also about all the things that accompany it like budgeting, estimating, and scheduling. Probably the most important one is …

Django 1.0 Template Development Book Review

Oct. 15, 2009

Packt Publishing was nice enough to send us a copy of Django 1.0 Template Development by Scott Newman for review recently. I get most of my technical information via the web, so picking up a technical book was a nice …

Easy Fabric Deployment, Part 2: Multiple Committers and the Dreaded Umask

Oct. 7, 2009

In part 1, we showed how we use Fabric to update and deploy Django sites to our development server with a single command. This works great when you only have one developer pushing changes to the server, but what happens …

Easy Fabric Deployment, Part 1: Git/Mercurial and SSH

Sept. 22, 2009

We’re firm believers in the practices described by the Continuous Integration method of software engineering. Among those are: Maintain a code repository Automate the build Automate deployment We use git for our code repositories and Fabric to automate our build/deployment …

Customizing the Django Admin at EuroDjangoCon 2009

June 22, 2009

Last month, Lincoln Loop gave a talk at EuroDjangoCon about customizing the Django admin interface. After presenting some of the admin customizations we had done on Gondola, I had a bunch of people get in touch with me asking me …

Highlighting Named Anchors with jQuery

April 17, 2009

I’ve always disliked the way named anchors (<a href="#name">...</a>) behave in browsers. It jumps your viewport to a different part of the page, but it’s rarely obvious which section you have landed on. If the page is long enough, the …

Django Best Practices

April 9, 2009

This post got a bit long-winded, skip to the project announcment if you prefer. One of the things I love about Python and Django is the philosophy that there is one obvious way to do things. Standards make it easy …

Open Source Government

Feb. 19, 2009

While browsing the source code of President Obama’s latest web initiative, recovery.org, I noticed something of interest. <script type="text/javascript"><![CDATA[//><!]]></script> Wow, this can’t be true. Can it? $ curl -I http://www.recovery.gov HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: must-revalidate Date: …

Satchmo Screencast

Dec. 23, 2008

Satchmo is an amazing E-Commerce engine built on top of Django. After struggling in the past with difficult packages like ZenCart and OSCommerce, Satchmo’s ease of customization make it a joy to work with. Unfortunately, all the features can make …

Simple & Easy Deployment with Fabric and Virtualenv

Dec. 7, 2008

In the process of prepping Gondola CMS for public consumption, we’ve grown from having a developer (me), to having a development team. One pain point that quickly arose was the amount of time it took for new developers to setup …

On Static Media and Django

Nov. 13, 2008

We all know not to serve static media (images, CSS, Javascript, etc.) in production directly from Django. Thankfully, Django gives us some nice settings like MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT to make serving them a lot less painless. Lately, however, I’ve come …